Regardless of the digitization of technology and the workplace, use of paper is still growing on an annual basis. Global production in the pulp, paper and publishing sector has continued to increase annually to this day. A large majority of pages printed both at home and in the workplace are disposed of, either as trash or by recycling, the average lifespan of a print being less than 1 day. Thus, the amount of waste is enormous; more than 700 pounds of paper are consumed by the average American every year. Although paper is not considered an expensive commodity, the economic impact of the sheer volume is tremendous; this is estimated at about 10000 pages per year per office employee. Not to mention the impact on forests worldwide and the impact on the atmosphere.
Many companies aim to reduce their dependence on paper, for example by working mainly in a paperless environment. This typically requires digitizing archives and converting new documents arriving at the company into digital form. Such processes are costly and run the risk of loss of information due to scanning errors, for example by digitizing documents and destroying them only to later discover that the digitization process was unsuccessful.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,216,592 dated Dec. 22, 2015 the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, discloses a system and method for reprinting on paper using an automated digitizing and erasing system to backup, erase and reuse enhanced paper.
The ease of forming copies of documents tends to lead to a common problem of having multiple copies of documents. Digitizing the paper documents may reduce the clutter but still leaves the problem of having a database of data with a lot of duplication. Thus it is desirable to have a system that can also help in de-duplicating paper documents, for example providing a single digitized copy from multiple copies of a specific paper document.